Simon Wakeman

Bells and whistles

If you’re browsing the site and hover over an external link, you now get a small preview screenshot of the website that is linked to. This gives you a feel for the site without actually having to click through.

This service is called Snap Preview Anywhere and is absolutely free. It’s also a doddle to install – just copy and paste one line of code into the head of your HTML template.

I’d be interested to see if this proves useful or a bit annoying – I’m unsure at the moment but thought I’d give it a shot.

The other new feature is a new Grazr to replace my ridiculously long blogroll, podroll and vidroll. This was starting to get so long that it was unbalancing the blog page layout – the left hand column was much much longer than the other two.

My new Grazr (it’s here) shows all the feeds I’m tracking. It’s updated live from my Newsgator/FeedDemon subscriptions, so as I subscribe, unsubscribe or categorise a feed in my reader it will appear immediately on the site. This works by publishing my OPML list in Newsgator as publicly available (here).

The only downside is that my private feeds are also shown as I can’t work out a way to stop them appearing in the OPML without actually unsubscribing. However because of the nature of the information they contain the feeds are password protected anyway, so there shouldn’t be any security risk.

4 Comments on “Bells and whistles”

To solve the private feed problem – in NewsGator Online, go to “Edit Locations”. Create a new custom location; then edit the feeds in that location to only be the ones you want to expose. Once that’s done, expose the OPML for that location, and you should be good to go!

Hmm…they’re not organized by folder when you’re on the screen where you can select them. Probably the best thing to do would be select all of them (there’s a button to do this with one click), and then remove the private ones.